The magnetic-recording, hard-disk-drive (HDD) industry is extremely competitive. The demands of the market for ever increasing storage capacity, storage speed, and other enhancement features compounded with the desire for low cost creates tremendous pressure for manufacturing economies. Therefore, any cost savings that can be found in the manufacturing process attracts significant attention on the part of engineers assigned the task of manufacturing these complex devices.
One area of the manufacturing process where considerable economies can be made is in the reduction of the number of parts used in the HDD. Therefore, engineers are constantly striving to find more elegant and efficient designs both to reduce the number of parts, and the attending assembly costs associated with those parts, and to improve the quality of the assembled HDD, which often results when fewer parts are incorporated in an HDD design that otherwise might introduce other sources of failure. Therefore, lowering the cost of HDDs and improving the reliability of HDDs through innovations directed towards more elegant and efficient designs with fewer parts are of paramount importance for maintaining a competitive edge in the HDD manufacturing business.